David and Goliath

Everyone wants the underdog to win. When you come from a small country, as I do, you become very partisan for underdogs of all stripes, so even if I did not work for Kainos (a successful, understated underdog) I suspect that I would have no difficulty in siding with the underdog in the latest David vs. Goliath tussle in the world of government IT. This is about whether the GDS approach of favouring SMEs over the large (and for many years dominant) SIs is sensible or doomed. SMEs, goes the argument, are all well and good in certain specialist areas, but they can't - and should not be expected to - do the heavy IT lifting that is necessary to provide robust services to 60 million UK citizens. The FT ran the following article http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1621d0aa-f7d9-11e3-baf5-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=uk#axzz35AyCCm3m describing the political squabble over IT. Bryan Glick's article in Computer Weekly provides a balanced and succinct summary of the debate http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/editors-blog/2014/06/big-it-vs-sme-it-in-government.html. He gets to the heart of the matter: 'The "Big IT" versus "SME IT" argument is a smokescreen What really matters is genuine competition, with government sourcing IT products and services from the best suppliers for the job, without commercial or technical lock-in, without undue complexity or cost, in a broad and diverse supplier universe that best serves the needs of taxpayers.' Quite right, too. Problem is, there's an election coming soon, and so the quality of debate is diminishing. Already, big vs. small IT has become a political issue, with the Conservatives (not the Coalition!) on the side of the plucky little entrepreneur, and Labour and LibDems both in the SI camp. Each stresses that they do not want to politicise the issue, and both are at pains to highlight the excellent work that GDS has done to date; but they diverge completely on where to go next. In some respects, I'm hugely pleased with this kerfuffle. Since when has IT been a general election issue? We're the back-office boys and girls, and we don't usually get invited to the smart parties with the beautiful people. Yet here we are in the pages of the FT. I'm also a little amused at the alliances that are forced by political expediency: here we have the Left cosying up to global (and for the most part non-UK) multinationals, all of whom have large offshore operations. The Tories at least remain ideologically consistent in supporting small (often regional) enterprise. Most of all, I'm amazed at how quickly everyone has forgotten the rationale for GDS in the first place: it exists because IT in government has not delivered much to the taxpayer, the citizen or the public servant over the past twenty years. Worse, it has a record of unmitigated disaster: the NHS National Programme for IT is the most frequently cited failure because it's one of the largest in history, but in fact it's one of many. It's unfair to lay the blame for these failures solely at the feet of the large SIs, but the government's procurement policies and supplier engagement model was unquestionably a large part of the problem. In any case, the genie is out of the bottle. The GDS approach may not be perfect, and certainly needs to be adjusted to meet the requirements of some of the larger government departments, but it has already achieved many of its objectives. And it's managed to put government IT on the front pages.